Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo
Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to supporters at a caucus night campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, February 3, 2020.
Welcome to my semi-educated guesses. If I could be even a smidgen more definitive, believe me, I would be.
Let’s posit that Joe Biden bombed in Iowa yesterday, though as I write the explosion has yet to be heard. If the results actually show a Joe fully tanked, thereby further depressing his prospects in New Hampshire, that means the centrist lane in this year’s Democratic contest has finally been unblocked. In that sense, while Pete Buttigieg’s claim of victory last night may have been as exaggerated as the accounts of Mark Twain’s death, Buttigieg probably had a good night even if he placed third. It would mean that Biden’s money will quickly dry up, and that Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg will now duke it out for Top Centrist.
That contest will pit a guy who doesn’t actually like public speaking or pressing the flesh (that’s Bloomberg) against a guy who loves public speaking so long as it stays on the level of clichéd generalities. The unbearable lightness of Buttigieg’s “victory” speech last night was stunning in its way. What we heard was that this was our moment if we all work together, that Democrats offering more progressive policies were merely perpetuating the differences that beset us, that Buttigieg could assemble a coalition that welcomed and included everybody, that’s he’s a middle-class mayor from the Midwest, that the skeptics who said he was too naïve in his hopes to bridge the great national divide had been proven wrong, that we can’t beat Trump by roping off people who don’t agree with us all the time—indeed, Buttigieg spent much more time attacking, always at the level of generalities, the politics of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren than he did stating any policy ideas of his own (to which he devoted about a minute affirming his commitment to workers and his opposition to endless wars).
Pete’s not much on concrete nouns.
Bernie, by contrast, delivered his customary stump speech. I’m a longtime Bernie fan, but when he’s called upon on election nights—even election nights when there are no results—to deliver something special or different, he doesn’t really rise to the occasion. His speeches don’t lack for concrete nouns and real policies, but by now, most Americans with a passing interest in politics have heard his stump speech multiple times. I know, my man Marx—Bernie’s man, too—focused almost infinitely more on detailing capitalism’s flaws than he did on sketching the socialist future, but Marx wasn’t running for president. Bernie needs to talk more about the nation he’d like us to build, not just the one we need to reconfigure.
Assuming Elizabeth Warren ran no lower than third last night, she’s still in the game. That said, if you look at the poll averages since September, it’s clear that Bernie’s rise has come chiefly at her expense. She remains, however, the heavy favorite in the race for everyone’s second choice, and that may just sustain her candidacy. Should Bloomberg and Buttigieg divide the centrist vote going forward, there may yet be a lane for voters who don’t relish their centrism yet have reservations about Sanders’s policies or prospects. Should the Democrats arrive at their convention with no candidate able to claim a majority of the delegates, a Warren-Sanders bloc might just prevail if they could agree on who’s on the ticket, and where. Of course, the same might be true of a Buttigieg-Bloomberg bloc.
I move from the realm of speculation to a statement of the obvious when I say that last night was the self-inflicted death knell of the Iowa caucuses—and, I hope, of caucuses altogether. There are now only four states that hold caucuses instead of primaries, but that’s still four too many. Even well-run caucuses are subject to the vagaries of delegate-bargaining. They can have confusing outcomes. They invariably turn out a far smaller and less representative share of the Democratic electorate than primaries.
Abolishing caucuses and moving Iowa to the back of the pack are some of the remedies that the Democrats should immediately undertake. And when the Democratic National Convention convenes in Milwaukee this summer, the Iowa delegation—or at least the leaders of its state party—should be seated in Green Bay.
